Islam empowers some British women

Madeleine Bunting, Guardian News Service, London

We're sitting in a stylish club, ArRum, in Clerkenwell, central London. Firelight is flickering on the leather sofas, there is contemporary art on the walls and delicious "fusion" food on the table, but what distinguishes this club from its many neighbors is that it is Muslim, there is no alcohol on the menu and downstairs there's a prayer room.

The stylish place conveys a complex ethos -- modern, yet true to its Muslim identity. A suitable setting, then, chosen by the six Muslim women who agreed to meet me to discuss Islam and the position of women. All university graduates, all in their mid-20s in careers ranging from journalism to teaching, all have chosen in the past few years to wear the hijab (a scarf wrapped tightly around their heads to conceal every wisp of hair).

Most strikingly, however, all of these women cogently articulate how they believe Islam has liberated and empowered them. The Islam they describe is a million miles away from that of the Taliban, but they insist that the Islam they first discovered when they were teenagers is true to the Prophet's teachings. They don't need western feminism, which, they argue, developed as a reaction against expression of western patriarchy.

They believe that within the Koranic tradition and the life of the Prophet lie the rights and inspiration a woman needs to achieve her full potential -- the challenge ahead is to educate Muslim girls and women so that they have that knowledge. They justify wearing the hijab, either as a public statement of their own spiritual quest, or of their political identity in a world where Islam perceives itself as under threat, or both.

Shagufta, the 25-year-old editor of the Muslim magazine Q News, was brought up in London, in a traditional Pakistani home where the emphasis was on cultural conservatism rather than piety. A marriage to a cousin from Pakistan was arranged for her when she was about 10. Her parents had no wish for her to continue her education, and her adoption of the hijab was her rebellion against this traditional cultural background.

"When I first put on hijab, my parents were shocked," she says. They would have been happier for her to wear the Pakistani shalwar kameez and a loose headscarf. "But I found liberation in Islam. It gave me the confidence to insist on a good education and reject the arranged marriage. Islam made sense to me, and I could understand it, as opposed to what I had grown up with. Plus, it was compatible with ... being a British Muslim, rather than Pakistani."

Shagufta was influenced by her friend Soraya's decision to put on hijab. Soraya said, "The Koran says that men and women are equal in the eyes of God, and that we are like a garment for each other to protect one another."

The women repeated emphasize these two themes, evoked in richly poetic Koranic metaphor: First, the equality of the sexes in the eyes of God (the most meaningful equality of all, they argue), and second, the complementarity of the sexes.

There is indeed plenty of material in the Koran that is more egalitarian than the western Christian tradition, which was heavily influenced by the misogyny of Greek thought. Perhaps the most fundamental is that the Islamic God does not have a gender.

Arabic may refer to him by use of the male pronoun, but he is never described as "father" or "lord" as he is in the Judaeo- Christian tradition. Indeed, the Islamic God has characteristics that are expressly feminine; one of his most important "names" is al-Rahman (the All-Compassionate) from the Arabic rahma, which comes from the word rahim, meaning womb.

As one Muslim woman, Sartaz Aziz, writes, "I am deeply grateful that my first ideas of God were formed by Islam, because I was able to think of the Highest Power as one without sex or race and thus completely unpatriarchal."

Jasmin also escaped from an arranged marriage by discovering Islam. Her transition to full religious observance came after university, working for a television company. "I went to Agadir on holiday, returned with a fantastic tan, but went back to work in a hijab ... One of my colleagues couldn't understand. She was crying as she said to me, 'One moment you were a sex kitten, the next you're all wrapped up.' She thought I was repressing myself; I felt I had achieved liberation.

"The attention I got from the other sex changed ... they had to take an interest in what was in my head and in my personality, rather than my body. Sometimes, when I flick through a fashion magazine, I think of taking off the hijab, but it passes quickly. Too many women exert power through their sexuality, and that's degrading to women. It's a form of enslavement."

The importance of each of these women's decisions to wear the hijab leads quickly to a heated discussion about where and how and why one expresses one's sexuality.

They believe that the proper place to express sexuality is in the privacy of an intimate relationship. Sexuality is not to be used to assert power but to express love, they add.

What they hotly deny is that veiling, and modesty in public, is a form of repression. It is not about shame of the female body, but about claiming privacy over their bodies. The Moroccan writer, Fatima Mernissi, ponders on how, in the West, women reclaiming their bodies has led to the public expression of their sexuality, whereas in Islam it is about modesty.

The associations with shame and repression stem from the influence of the Christian tradition's hostility to sexuality and hence women, and the legacy of confusion and guilt that has bequeathed western society. Islam, they argue, has a healthy honesty and acceptance of human sexuality, which is evident in a wealth of detail in Islamic jurisprudence.

Dr Tim Winter, a Muslim convert and Cambridge lecturer, among the most respected Islamic scholars in Britain, says Islam does not accept the mythology of Eve seducing Adam, thus triggering the Fall and the endless cycle of death and procreation.

According to Christian thought, sex was the result of human beings' fallen state and was traditionally regarded with distaste; celibacy was promoted as a sublimation of sexual energies in pursuit of God, epitomized by Christ's celibate life.

Nothing provides a sharper contrast with that model of holiness than the life of the Prophet Mohammad, who took 12 wives after the death of his first wife, Khadija. His love for his wives and sexual relationships with them are referred to in the hadith (the sayings of the Prophet).

One of the injunctions on a husband is that he must sexually satisfy his wife; the Prophet recommends foreplay, and a great Islamic scholar, Imam Ghazali, warned men not to come too quickly. As Mernissi points out in Beyond The Veil, Islam always understood that women's sexuality was active, while western Christianity socialized women into accepting sexual passivity. The latter, argues Mernissi, was a way of internalizing in women the control on female sexuality that men wanted; Muslim cultures used external controls of segregation and male authority.

The above women say that, for them, the affirmation of women's sexuality in Islam renders pointless many of the battles fought by western feminists. They have no need of Madonna-style exhibitionism to assert the power of female sexuality. One woman said that the one achievement of feminism that she admired was to break down the restrictive passivity of Victorian perceptions of female sexuality.

Aisha and Khadija come out as the two top Koranic role models for these women. Khadija, the Prophet's first wife, was old (40) by the standards of the day when she proposed to the 25-year-old Mohammed. His first believer, she was his sole wife and a close adviser until her death. It was only then that the Prophet took other wives.

All the women rolled off a long list of hadiths (traditions) and Koranic verses to support women's rights: The right to education; the right to work and the right to keep the money they earn, while men must use their earnings to look after their womenfolk; property rights; in one school of Islamic thought, women don't have to clean or cook for their husbands unless they are paid for it (wages for housework long before the 20th century thought it had invented it); the fact that the Prophet, according to Aisha, was something of a new man, and used to clean and sew when he wasn't praying.

There are parts of Koranic tradition that, to a western eye, seem deeply shocking. By some accounts, Aisha was only nine when her marriage to the Prophet (then in his 50s) was consummated. Or that, although the Koran insists that a man should treat all his wives equally, the Prophet admitted that he had a favorite, Aisha. Or the controversial incident when the Prophet glimpsed the wife of his adopted son and, after she had been divorced, he married her. Worst of all to a sceptical western eye, the Prophet often invoked God to explain such incidents.

This is very sensitive territory for devout Muslim women. For believers, the Prophet's life was perfect and according to God's plan. They haven't the freedom to develop the critical analytical tradition of western feminism, which has been so important in understanding how patriarchy has influenced religious, legal, moral and political systems.

So, either they offer long explanations (such as that Aisha's age was due to the custom of the time and was probably not much different from the Virgin Mary's), or they acknowledge there are some things that they find very difficult.

As one woman put it, "When I read about the Prophet's life, I feel it is unjust: he favored one wife over another ... I haven't found a scholar who can explain it, but I believe in a just God and the wisdom of the Prophet, so I take it on trust. That's faith. To have real knowledge of Islam is to study it for a long time; eventually, I might find an interpretation that satisfies me."

What women such as Shagufta, Maha, Soraya, Fareena and Jasmin want is to return to the freedoms that Islam brought women in the 7th century and beyond, when women became prominent Islamic scholars, poets and thinkers.

There is a striking bravery in these British Muslim women in their struggle to understand what they see as timeless truths and apply them to 21st-century life. They assiduously attend home- study circles, travel to California and the Middle East for special courses, take up correspondence courses with Islamic scholars and read to deepen their knowledge of Islam.

They believe they are pioneering a spiritual renewal and a rediscovery of a faith that empowers women.